On the 100th anniversary of Boreham's arrival in Australia, the Official F W Boreham Blog Site has been established to foster interest and discussion on the life and writings of F W Boreham.
There are thousands of people around the world who have become acquainted with the writings of F W Boreham. I welcome your thoughts or questions on his life and writing and any research you have undertaken about this man and his work.

Frank William Boreham 1871-1959

A photo F W Boreham took of himself in 1911

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Boreham on Beauty in the Unexpected

Romance of MonotonyIn the tradition of Joseph Turner and William Blake, F W Boreham wrote many editorials on the ordinary experience of discovering beauty and truth in the unexpected. As Turner in his painting ‘Rain, steam and speed’ portrayed beauty in a train rushing through rain, Boreham perceived fascination in prosaic sources, which included “the romance of monotony”,[1] “the romance of the bank”[2] and “the evolution of pockets”.[3] Such themes were mined for truth but the unexpected and unlikely topics were also designed to arrest attention and add to Boreham’s ‘surprise power’. Other titles which caught the interest of readers and reviewers included the editorials ‘Wet paint’,[4] ‘Second wind’,[5] ‘The fly in the ointment’,[6] ‘If’,[7] ‘Black sheep’[8] and ‘Keep off the grass’.[9] Additional stylistic devices included the use of graphic statements as in his definition of tea as “liquid prophecy”[10] or his description of an acorn as “a pocket edition of a forest”.[11]

Appreciator of Small ThingsAt times, Dr. Boreham’s treatment of ordinary things seemed unexpected because the subjects were quaint or even trivial. In the tradition of the early French essayist Michel de Montaigne,[12] who wrote about ‘Sleeping’, ‘Thumbs’ and ‘Smells and Odours’, Boreham addressed seemingly unimportant subjects such as ‘Left-handedness’,[13] ‘Hats’,[14] ‘The man in the moon’,[15] ‘Smoke’,[16] ‘Scarecrows’,[17] ‘Babies’,[18] ‘Boots and shoes’[19] and ‘Sugar and spice’.[20] This feature of Boreham’s editorial writing saturated his life and wider work. His contemporary, J J North, identified this characteristic when describing Boreham: “From the beginning of his career he has been a tremendous appreciator of small things. He was never guilty of despising them. He came from London to Mosgiel. Mosgiel was, if we may be forgiven the pun, saved from the moss by a solitary woollen mill. Otherwise it belonged to the cow and the plough and to the pleasant murmur of the bees”.[21]

In an assessment of the early part of his career, North described the Boreham trademark of presenting surprising and peculiar topics: “It was something to hear a man fresh from London town who would preach on the inner meaning of test matches and hitting your middle wicket, who, as the Boer war came on, could give a series on David’s valiant men who slew bears in pits on snowy days”.[22]

Trivial but TreasuresFrank Boreham was aware that others sometimes found his subjects preposterous yet upon reviewing his life he found justification for his style when declaring: “The things that most readily rush to mind are things that, at first blush, seem ridiculously trivial ... and yet the fact that the mind insists on treasuring such trifles, letting slip many incidents of greater apparent importance, may indicate that memory has a more just standard of values than we sometimes fancy”.[23]